William White Blog: Recovery’s Final Chapters

October 5, 2015

“Long-term addiction recovery has a beginning (or many beginnings), a middle, and an end. Nearly all our national resources allocated to addiction are devoted to the first of these stages, even as efforts of the past 15 years have pushed a vision of support into the mid-life of personal and family recovery. All of these are noble efforts, but they leave unanswered the questions generations have faced in the final chapters of their lives. After living a life in recovery, how does one face death in recovery? Recovery must be managed in this last context or be lost after being hard-earned and so carefully sustained and protected.

There is some attention paid to the addiction vulnerabilities of older adults, but one can find few scientific studies and little experiential knowledge captured within mutual aid literature about the final stages of one’s life as a person in recovery. This is regrettable in that these final stages offer threats to, but opportunities within, the recovery process.”